Summary

The directives contained in this module allow for manipulation
and control of URLs as requests arrive at the server. The
Alias and ScriptAlias directives are used to
map between URLs and filesystem paths. This allows for content
which is not directly under the DocumentRoot served as part of the web
document tree. The ScriptAlias directive has the
additional effect of marking the target directory as containing
only CGI scripts.

The Redirect
directives are used to instruct clients to make a new request with
a different URL. They are often used when a resource has moved to
a new location.

mod_alias is designed to handle simple URL
manipulation tasks. For more complicated tasks such as
manipulating the query string, use the tools provided by
mod_rewrite.

Directives

Topics

See also

Aliases and Redirects occuring in different contexts are processed
like other directives according to standard merging rules. But when multiple
Aliases or Redirects occur in the same context (for example, in the
same <VirtualHost>
section) they are processed in a particular order.

First, all Redirects are processed before Aliases are processed,
and therefore a request that matches a Redirect or RedirectMatch will never have Aliases
applied. Second, the Aliases and Redirects are processed in the order
they appear in the configuration files, with the first match taking
precedence.

For this reason, when two or more of these directives apply to the
same sub-path, you must list the most specific path first in order for
all the directives to have an effect. For example, the following
configuration will work as expected:

Alias /foo/bar /baz
Alias /foo /gaq

But if the above two directives were reversed in order, the
/fooAlias
would always match before the /foo/barAlias, so the latter directive would be
ignored.

The Alias directive allows documents to
be stored in the local filesystem other than under the
DocumentRoot. URLs with a
(%-decoded) path beginning with url-path will be mapped
to local files beginning with directory-path. The
url-path is case-sensitive, even on case-insenitive
file systems.

Example:

Alias /image /ftp/pub/image

A request for http://myserver/image/foo.gif would cause
the server to return the file /ftp/pub/image/foo.gif.

Note that if you include a trailing / on the
url-path then the server will require a trailing / in
order to expand the alias. That is, if you use

Alias /icons/ /usr/local/apache/icons/

then the url /icons will not be aliased.

Note that you may need to specify additional <Directory> sections which
cover the destination of aliases. Aliasing occurs before
<Directory> sections
are checked, so only the destination of aliases are affected.
(Note however <Location>
sections are run through once before aliases are performed, so
they will apply.)

In particular, if you are creating an Alias to a
directory outside of your DocumentRoot, you may need to explicitly
permit access to the target directory.

This directive is equivalent to Alias, but makes use of standard
regular expressions, instead of simple prefix matching. The
supplied regular expression is matched against the URL-path, and
if it matches, the server will substitute any parenthesized
matches into the given string and use it as a filename. For
example, to activate the /icons directory, one might
use:

AliasMatch ^/icons(.*) /usr/local/apache/icons$1

It is also possible to construct an alias with case-insensitive
matching of the url-path:

The Redirect directive maps an old URL into a new one by asking
the client to refetch the resource at the new location.

The old URL-path is a case-sensitive (%-decoded) path
beginning with a slash. A relative path is not allowed. The new
URL should be an absolute URL beginning with a scheme and
hostname.

Example:

Redirect /service http://foo2.bar.com/service

If the client requests http://myserver/service/foo.txt, it
will be told to access http://foo2.bar.com/service/foo.txt
instead.

Note

Redirect directives take precedence over
Alias and ScriptAlias directives, irrespective of their ordering in
the configuration file. Also, URL-path must be a fully
qualified URL, not a relative path, even when used with .htaccess files or
inside of <Directory>
sections.

If no status argument is given, the redirect will
be "temporary" (HTTP status 302). This indicates to the client
that the resource has moved temporarily. The status
argument can be used to return other HTTP status codes:

permanent

Returns a permanent redirect status (301) indicating that
the resource has moved permanently.

temp

Returns a temporary redirect status (302). This is the
default.

seeother

Returns a "See Other" status (303) indicating that the
resource has been replaced.

gone

Returns a "Gone" status (410) indicating that the
resource has been permanently removed. When this status is
used the URL argument should be omitted.

Other status codes can be returned by giving the numeric
status code as the value of status. If the status is
between 300 and 399, the URL argument must be present,
otherwise it must be omitted. Note that the status must be
known to the Apache code (see the function
send_error_response in http_protocol.c).

This directive is equivalent to Redirect, but makes use of standard
regular expressions, instead of simple prefix matching. The
supplied regular expression is matched against the URL-path, and
if it matches, the server will substitute any parenthesized
matches into the given string and use it as a filename. For
example, to redirect all GIF files to like-named JPEG files on
another server, one might use:

The ScriptAlias directive has the same
behavior as the Alias
directive, except that in addition it marks the target directory
as containing CGI scripts that will be processed by mod_cgi's cgi-script handler. URLs with a case-sensitive
(%-decoded) path beginning with URL-path will be mapped
to scripts beginning with the second argument, which is a full
pathname in the local filesystem.

Example:

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /web/cgi-bin/

A request for http://myserver/cgi-bin/foo would cause the
server to run the script /web/cgi-bin/foo. This configuration
is essentially equivalent to:

It is safer to avoid placing CGI scripts under the
DocumentRoot in order to
avoid accidentally revealing their source code if the
configuration is ever changed. The
ScriptAlias makes this easy by mapping a
URL and designating CGI scripts at the same time. If you do
choose to place your CGI scripts in a directory already
accessible from the web, do not use
ScriptAlias. Instead, use <Directory>, SetHandler, and Options as in:

This is necessary since multiple URL-paths can map
to the same filesystem location, potentially bypassing the
ScriptAlias and revealing the source code
of the CGI scripts if they are not restricted by a
Directory section.

This directive is equivalent to ScriptAlias, but makes use of standard
regular expressions, instead of simple prefix matching. The
supplied regular expression is matched against the URL-path,
and if it matches, the server will substitute any parenthesized
matches into the given string and use it as a filename. For
example, to activate the standard /cgi-bin, one
might use: